In Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye #20, things are looking bleak as hell for the crew of the Lost Light, who have stumbled onto the missing Cybertronian moon Luna-1, which is full of weird mysteries – like a garden of sparks, a massive graveyard of Metrotitans, and an army of Legislator drones commanded by Chief Justice Tyrest, a madmech convinced that genocide is his only means to redemption. He’s already killed the one we knew as Ultra Magnus, his mad scientist Pharma is busy torturing Ratchet, he has Rodimus and his braintrust held captive, the rest of crew is being overrun by an onslaught of Legislators, and he’s about to murder every Cybertronian en masse who did not have the good fortune of being “forged” instead of “constructed cold.”
It’s essentially a religious difference, except Tyrest claims to be the one who cold constructed all the constructed cold folks by bleeding out the Matrix. He now finds that to be a grievous mistake he must correct in order to be allowed through a mysterious portal he’s built from the corpses of dead Metrotitans (i.e. massively giant robots of ancient folklore) which he believes will transport him to the promised land with the fabled Knights of Cybertron, who happen to be the same beings that the Lost Light has been questing to find, too. Tyrest has also built a “universal killswitch.” With one activation, he plans to “purify” Cybertronians of his mistakes – and that means killing lots and lots of people we know and love.
As Tyrest gears up for his masterstroke, the Autobots are frantically trying to put all the pieces together, while their new cellmate Getaway finally fills in the mysterious blanks surrounding Skids and his memory gaps – apparently, they were members of The Diplomatic Corps, which was a front name for Autobot Special Ops – “guile, subtlety… that’s what we’re about. Precision. Because not every problem can be solved with brain bullets and bravado.” However, a “brain bullet” of a different sort was apparently used to attempt to take down Tyrest before – but with a “nudge gun,” a weapon that shoots artificial thoughts at people. This one was trying to get Tyrest to resign, but he was onto them and the mission was compromised. However, he’s not named Getaway for nothing, and he manages to spring everybody from prison at about the same time Ratchet managed to rebuild a corpse into a weapon and bust out of his own cell.
Storming the gates doesn’t go as well as they’d hoped, though, because Tyrest is ready for them – having modified the ‘thought bullet’ into a weapon to immobilize everybody… and then he actually goes and flips the killswitch. The heroes don’t stop him, and some of them start dying in front of him… some start dying in various places throughout the galaxy, and some of them are extremely important characters, like Prowl and Starscream and Ravage and Blaster and… GOOD GOD HOW MANY ARE GOING TO DIE?
Writer James Roberts has shown that he’s not afraid of the kill-off, which is a luxury Transformers in general affords its creators, since there are just so many characters to use, some have to be considered expendable, and his genius is that he’s made us care about every damn one of them. He’s promised via Twitter that the next issue is going to be a tearjerker, too, and we believe that promise coming from the best Transformers fiction writer of all time. He knows what he’s doing, he’s a fountain of ideas, his dialogue is top-notch and we never have any idea what’s coming next. Plus, Alex Milne’s kinetic, detailed artwork is a perfect fit for Roberts’ kinetic, detailed world.
My usual refrain remains true. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye is the best we’ve ever had it as TF fans. In fact, some of us realize that the history of TF fiction and fandom may mean that James Roberts is a better writer than we deserve, but we never want him to leave. No pressure.
